Andrés Cerpa is the author of two previous books of poetry, Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (2019) and The Vault (2021), which was longlisted for a National Book Award and celebrated as one of the best poetry books of 2021 by The New York Times. A recipient of a McDowell fellowship, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is an educator and faculty member of the Randolph MFA Program. Website: www.andrescerpa.com
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Andrés Cerpa about his latest book The Palace. Having read Cerpa’s previous books, I was struck by how this collection’s themes—time, grief, love, addiction, and diaspora—layer upon one another and interlock with those earlier works. In this book, the speaker’s past weaves in and out of the present, and the reader joins him in navigating that labyrinth through sharp lines and bold images that refuse to turn away from their social and political contexts. The book is available now through the publisher, Alice James Books.
Meghan Elizabeth Kelley: Andrés, thanks for speaking with us, and congratulations on the book. Let’s begin with the first poem, “Late Work,” which I love. The opening line in that poem reads, “I feel compelled to give you an ending, a promise of hope.” Right away, from this first poem, there’s a sense of something already having happened, and I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about that.
Andrés Cerpa: You’ve touched on something incredibly important to the book. In ways, the whole book is grappling with the past’s engagement with the present. A few poems later, there’s a line that says, “so much has happened already.” Part of what has already happened is not just the grand events, but the small, everyday moments that compile in their significance. Something large, nearly mythic, is encompassed in these smaller moments, and I am struck by how they can be so lasting. The scent of lavender outside of a city, a broken spigot at the edge of a cemetery, things that seem meaningless even as I say them right now, but I have been thinking about those snippets, seeing them again and again in my mind for decades.
MEK: Reading the book, I sensed the significance of these seemingly small but lasting moments. I wonder if you could also talk about the “you” in that line and the “you’s” that occur later in the book.
AC: Your question makes me realize how many “you’s” emerge within the first section of the book: some of them are directed at a specific person, some are directed at the reader, and some are directed at former versions of myself. But the one you refer to here in the first poem is directed toward the reader. In a way, it connects back to the first poem in my first book, “Letter,” and how, in many ways, my poems are epistolary. The “you” here is also about engaging others. I read these poems to people in rooms. I believe that sharing poems is an act of communion, of reaching out of the solitary writing process into a type of connection.
MEK: I feel that engagement in the book. For me, having the different “you’s” throughout helped make the poems feel more tangible, like they weren’t just happening in a vacuum. In a similar vein, I’ve noticed you often repeat certain words across poems. Some examples are “wolf,” “snow,” “knife,” and “heaven,” but there are others. Could you speak about your choice to use repetition in this way?
AC: The words you mention are archetypal, but I have a deep and specific relationship to these words. I think part of this has to do with memory and that a person’s relationship to a memory often changes over time. The book holds memories in the sense that my experiences in the world, although altered and not strictly autobiographical, are in it. But also, the poems have connections to one another and the reader. Hopefully, subconsciously or consciously, the reader remembers other poems, feelings, or words that allow the repetition to not only repeat but to develop, change, and gain a more nuanced and deeper meaning in the context of the life of the book.
MEK: One line in this book that struck me was: “it’s all one poem, / one orchard, one tree // in the forest of air.” Are you are thinking about this kind of repetition not just in this book but across all your books?
AC: Yes. I think of it as all one poem. I’ve been writing poems since I was 19, and I’m 35 now. It is a significant amount of my life spent reading and writing poems, and these archetypal words are foundational not only to my poetry but, in ways, have moved with me through my life. An image of a knife might begin in one poem as the speaker whittling a stick next to a river, and years later, it reappears in another poem hidden in a coat.
MEK: You’ve shared in interviews for prior books that you record yourself reading your poems, and even your full manuscripts, and listen to them back. Was recording yourself an important part of your process for this collection?
AC: While making this book, there was a period of time where I recorded poems rather than writing them. In 2020, I was working a job where I spent a lot of time walking around outside going door to door. The poems were immediate responses to this experience of being in the world. For certain poems, I’d begin by recording a voice memo just saying some lines and trying to catch some sonic momentum until I found something that compelled me. Then, I would create new voice memos where I’d attempt to remember the lines I loved most from the previous recordings, adding new lines and repeating this process until a poem emerged. I know many of these poems by heart because of that turning over aloud.
It often felt freeing to look up at the world and create, rather than writing with a pen. But it can be difficult to work through form and line breaks when the poem inevitably meets the page. I still record as a method of understanding my own work and as an editing tool. It was immensely helpful in organizing The Palace as a whole.
MEK: A central theme of this book is time and its non-linearity. The speaker and other characters are trying to move forward with their present lives but keep finding themselves in the past. How were you thinking about time as you wrote this book?
AC: Much like the way a single word takes on meaning across time, there are songs, images, gestures, and locations that transport us and remind us that all these timelines are very near. If I drive down the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, as I have so many times, that place feels heavy, layered with years of former selves, of memories of my dad and abuela, and my interactions with them. This might be connected to trauma, to ecstasy, or to something insignificant that I haven’t figured out yet, but I have no control over any of that. I am palpably there. The experience is full of mystery and simultaneity.
MEK: I think that idea feels connected to the book’s title. The Palace seems to encompass the ethereal, intangible moments of joy that are their own small palaces, but also, at its most basic, a palace is a physical structure underpinned by oppressive forces. Can you talk about how you accessed these poems within those social and political undercurrents?
AC: First, for all these comments and for seeing the work, thank you. There are powerful social and political forces attempting to diminish art and harness our attention. Forces that make it harder to live. But my deep belief with poetry is that the tunnel to the ethereal world is here around us. The ethereal, for me, also holds a darkness, but within that, it is ecstatic and nourishing. I think these poems are able to move through cruelty and difficulties, whether political, spiritual, or otherwise, because they also move toward love, and within those experiences of love, there is a wild hope.
MEK: Andrés, it’s been great to talk with you about this book. Thanks so much for your time and all that you’ve shared.
Meghan Elizabeth Kelley is a writer and poet from the Philadelphia, PA area. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, Bellingham Review, HAD, and Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine, among other places. She has an MFA from Randolph College.